September 2014

Sam Dechenne was an aspiring trumpet player, still in junior high school, when he looked through CDs in his local public library. One cover caught his eye, a picture of men holding shiny brass instruments, and he began to smile. The name of the band was exotic – Fanfare Ciocărlia. He had no idea what it meant or where they come from. But when he got home and played the disc, his life was changed forever. In that moment the foundation for Cocek! Brass Band was laid. Now their debut CD, ‘Here Comes Shlomo’ has arrived.

“I fell in love with the music,” recalls Dechenne. “It really spoke to me. From there I discovered more Balkan brass and it became the biggest influence on the band.”

For all that they’re named after a Balkan dance, Cocek! Brass Brand aren’t slavish copyists of the style. It’s definitely there, but it’s only one ingredient in a spicy stew of horns. The five-piece (two trumpets, trombone, tuba, and drums) also draw from jazz, New Orleans, and even reggae – not too much of a stretch as Dechenne is a member of John Brown’s Body, one of America’s leading roots reggae bands.

“I wrote all the material on the album,” Dechenne explains. ‘We’re not trying to be traditional. It comes from all the music I’ve played, whether it’s Balkan, West African, Dixieland, classical brass, marching bands, or whatever.”

And so “Slow Jump, Fast Fall” carries echoes of the slow drag style of early jazz, while faint traces of “Summertime” drift across “Vagabond Dreamin’."

“I’ve been writing tunes for the last year,” Dechenne notes. “I didn’t really intend on doing anything with them. But when the band just came together last winter, we really hit the ground running, playing shows as much as we could for the last six months, then going into the studio. We already have another album’s worth of material.”

With just five players, Cocek! Brass Band is much smaller than most Balkan-style ensembles. But that was a very deliberate choice for Dechenne.

“I wanted it to be small in order to be sustainable,” he notes. “I play with larger bands and they’re so hard to organize. This way I can find voices that musicians don’t usually take on. So we’ll use the trumpets for harmonies while someone else takes on the melody, for instance, and the drums have a much larger role than usual. It means we’re constantly playing – there’s no laying out. By the end of a set we’re hurting.”

Listen closely and there’s plenty of klezmer in the sound, too. That’s unusual, as the style usually revolves around violin and clarinet. But it’s not too astonishing. Both Dechenne and tuba player Jim Gray work in Klezwoods, while drummer Grant Smith is a founder of the famed Klezmer Conservatory Band and works with the legendary Itzhak Perlman.

“It’s definitely there,” Dechenne agrees, “but there’s always been a crossover between klezmer and Roma music, which is one of the roots of Balkan brass. And half the tracks of the album are Balkan čoček dance tunes. People might not be able to pronounce the word (it’s cho-check) but that’s fine. What we really want is to bring this music to a wide range of people.”

The enthusiasm on the disc is infectious, from the woozy virtuosity of “Clown Walk” to the more reflective closer, “Mountain Love Song.” And what they do is enough to convince people who grew up with that brass sound.

“We played a show in Boston and a bunch of guys from Serbia were in the audience. They stood right at the front with their arms crossed. We didn’t know what to expect. Afterwards, they came up and said they loved it.”

Although they use microphones for concerts, they can also play without amplification, which opens up more options. At a bar gig in New Hampshire they ended up playing out on the porch for the crowd that had assembled there on a warm spring evening.

“It’s not typical dance music for Americans, but it’s definitely party music,” Dechenne says. “And that’s what I want, that’s what matters to me. We’d love to play festivals and concerts, but we still want to play small bars, too.”

With Here Comes Shlomo, Cocek! Brass Band are on the way. It’s accomplished, brimming with confidence and invention. But Dechenne has never forgotten the seventh grader who was so transfixed by Fanfare Ciocărlia.

“They played her in January and I finally had the chance to see them. When the show was over I told them about my band.” He pauses, as if he can’t quite believe the response. “They said we should come over to Romania. And that we could stay with them. That’s pretty amazing.”

Imagine a global choir. More than two hundred voices, spread across the world and all coming together to sing without even leaving their homes. It’s a wonder of technology, but it’s also an act of community. And it’s what moira smiley & VOCO have created on their new album, Laughter Out of Tears, pulling together people from Australia, Europe, and all throughout North America to become the “Choir of YOU” on the record.

“I’ve had the Choir of YOU idea for a while,” Smiley explains, “but it seemed so appropriate for this album for a few reasons: My father died in 2012, I was feeling lost artistically, and communal singing was always a source of strength – a root for me. I write for choirs, and I know how powerful a gathering of voices can be. The Choir of YOU was a perfect way to bring myself ‘home’ again.”

Laughter Out of Tears continues a journey Smiley has begun with VOCO’s three previous releases, combining polyphonic songwriting with European and Appalachian folk song. There’s also a strong difference – this album is far more personal - with tracks flowing from one into the next, and Smiley's originals explicitly telling her recent journey through grief.

“It’s about moving out of sorrow into a place of joy, of laughter,” Smiley says. “My songwriting here is far more modern 'troubadour' than on any of the previous VOCO albums. It feels softer, more intimate – more folky. There’s much more of me at my most tender in here.”

The inspiring power of the Choir of YOU blossoms on five tracks of Laughter Out of Tears, from Smiley’s own love-song to her northern, mountain roots in "North Country" to her take on Robert Johnson's inimitable "They're Red Hot".

Gathering so many people was surprisingly easy; she was overwhelmed with mp3s. “People could download the tracks from my website, add their own voice by following the guide-tracks and sheet-music I posted there, then email their tracks to me. Easy!” she says. “Really, it was only the mixing that was tricky; that took several days to complete – but was one of the highlights of my year.”

Working with voices has always been Smiley’s joy. A virtuosic singer, she works with artists as varied as Paul Hillier, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, KITKA, Tim O’Brien, Solas and tUnE-yArDs, and has sung everything from Stockhausen and Stravinsky to traditional folk music – which remains her deepest love, to the level that she’s spent time as a song collector in the Balkans. She’s recorded Irish sean-nós on her solo record Rua, been featured on radio, television and films, taught at the University of Birmingham in England and several American universities, and been the recipient of an enviable list of grants and awards.

In 2006 Smiley formed VOCO, a five-piece group of singers and players, with an improvisational - and uniquely vocal - approach to American Eastern European folk music, and Smiley’s polyphonic originals.

“The band is made up of spare ingredients,” she says. “There’s usually cello, always body percussion, and everyone sings, of course. I write for three or four voices in harmony, and I play banjo and accordion.”

And the communal singing that swells the disc is also very much part of who Smiley is. But she hadn’t realized to quite what extent it was until she was working on Laughter Out of Tears.

“I feel I really get it now. There’s a feeling of being given a gift when you sing with others. Hearing the Choir of YOU on the record truly did feel like a home-coming. Working with other people like this makes me feel more committed to all the traveling, and live performance that I do.”

“I feel proud of the songwriting too,” she observes. “Songs like “Mazurka,” “Oh Winter” and “North Country” don’t shy away from personal storytelling. To me, they’re the heart of the album.”

It’s a disc that showcases both the personal and communal, and the delicate balance between the two. As well as a memorial to the father whose tenor voice was Smiley’s first guide into vocal harmony, the music encapsulates the vulnerable and playful sides of her personality, a journey from the night of sadness into the light of pleasure.

And in doing it she’s been able to let her own voice ring out, going from the sorrowful, confessional ache of Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl” to the unfettered enjoyment that runs through “Steam Engines” and “They’re Red Hot.”

It’s an album filled with release, a celebration and testament. But it also builds on everything that Smiley has done musically, forging something new and cohesive from all those scattered elements.

“I have a burning desire to do anything surprising, interesting, and challenging,” she says. And with Laughter Out of Tears, whether singing with VOCO or Choir of YOU, Moira Smiley has achieved all that.

Young dub masters Tour de Force team up with a planet-wide community of kindred spirits on Battle Cry Remixed.

The third time around, dub hits harder, sweeps wider. Spurred by a planet-wide passion, DJs worldwide are riding faders and remixing the sounds that started midcentury in the Caribbean. These sounds have always circled around hubs far from Kingston, places where the music zigged in a new direction.

Tour de Force have channeled the energy of one of these hubs, Brooklyn, tapping into Jamaican grooves with electronic savvy on their recent release, Battle Cry. Now, with Battle Cry Remixed, the dub duo give fans a whirlwind tour of the worldwide dub community. This network includes Hungarian/UK dubstep whiz DJ Madd, American raggabass pioneer Dub Gabriel, Canadian dub-meets-electro kingpin Dubmatix, UK reggae producer Adam Prescott, French dub pioneer Brain Damage, among others.

The original tracks and the remixes all flow from a common source, however: The unmistakable sound and presence of the old-school, high-power sound system. “There’s a Jamaican culture of sound systems,” explains DJ Q-Mastah, one half of Tour de Force, as well as the Dub-Stuy label. “With the rise of EDM, and fans enjoying this music on festival and concert PAs, the time’s right for a stronger connection between electronic music and sound system culture.”

Tour de Force and Dub-Stuy have found that connection, bringing elder Jamaican dub fans together with exuberant club kids. The same reach across the ages and continents presides on Battle Cry Remix.

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It all began with the sound system. Back in Jamaica in the 1940s a few intrepid men hand-built banks of speakers and amplifiers to play the latest American R&B releases at open-air dances in Kingston. Inspired by this music, local musicians and producers began recording their own tracks, contributing to ska and reggae. With the West Indian diaspora, the sound system became a fixture of British blues dances. It’s never died, and with Tour de Force and their lovingly-crafted 15,000-watt Tower of Sound sound system, it’s enjoying a huge revival in Brooklyn, New York.

Add to that the advent of the third wave of dub music. It originated as “versions” – the first remixes – of reggae songs in the early 1970s, pioneered by names like King Tubby, Lee “Scratch” Perry and Scientist, music to be played on sound systems. A second wave of dub in the 1990s pulled from those roots, but this time around, there’s a bigger pool of sounds and ideas artists are drawing on.

“We’re going back to that Jamaican source,” Q-Mastah acknowledges, “but we’re mixing in new styles from electronic music and dubstep.”

“I wanted to pay respect,” notes Double Tiger, the other half of the duo, “and also make it relevant for people who weren’t familiar with the past. Maybe it’ll send them back to the originals. On Battle Cry we had a formula. If there was a roots reggae bassline, we’d have dubstep drums. On a one-drop style, we’d use a synth bass. We were careful to mix everything equally.”

They also enlisted some powerful vocalists, like reggae icon Luciano and British MC Brother Culture on some of the tracks. And the connection with roots is evident in some of the riddims: “Pool Party” pays homage to early digital reggae with “Under Me Sleng Teng,” while Dennis Brown’s “Promised Land” underpins the title cut and the classic “Satta Massagana” riddim powers “Warmonger.” Like Tour de Force, it’s an album that looks equally to the past and the future.

The Tower of Sound and the Dub-Stuy label have garnered attention all over the world, and following the release of Battle Cry, they looked for a way to bring the global community together. A remix album was the perfect answer. It not only introduces the community to a wider US audience, it allows Tour de Force, which started in 2012 when Q-Mastah and Double Tiger met in Brooklyn, to act as an entry point for new dub fans.

They’ve certainly earned that right. They spent six month carefully building their rig. Not only is it powerful, as guests like Hank Shocklee (Bomb Squad) and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest) can attest, it’s also a labor of love and a thing of beauty that’s been displayed at Brooklyn Museum and New York Hall of Science.

But ultimately it’s about the music and the sound, and Tour de Force know that’s what really matters. “It’s a breath of fresh air,” observes Double Tiger. “We have older Jamaicans coming, young people into dubstep and steppers. It’s somewhere they can come together, the vibe is good. People are building systems all round the world.”

Dub helps unite them, and the versions of the original tracks on Battle Cry Remixed reach out to a broad audience of music fans.

“We asked some of the people we’re close to if they wanted to be involved,” recalls Q-Mastah. “It just grew and grew, but we had to limit the release to 15 tracks. The remixers picked their own tracks.”

“We were really fortunate to have such a dynamic community of producers,” says Double Tiger. “We wanted dubsteppers and steppers, doing something different to our sound. Sometimes we sent a mix back and told them to really make it their own.”

All over the world, the third wave of dub, where roots meets EDM, is rising. Tour de Force and their planetary posse are showing how hard that wave can hit.

Seattle. The whole world knows the bands that word conjures. But they only tell one small fragment of the city’s musical story. Hidden by the noise of electric guitars and the sweet scents of gentrification, a strong, vital underground scene still flourishes. A junkyard cabaret inhabited by the underdogs and freaks, caught in the sudden glare of burlesques and little jewel box clubs. A place filled with the joyous outcasts, of celebration and commiseration. And that’s where The Bad Things live. It’s the space they illuminate on their new album, After the Inferno.

“There’s definitely a history of outsiders in Washington State,” explains the band’s singer and accordionist, Jimmy ‘The Pickpocket’ Berg. “For over a century, people with radical minds have been coming up here. Seattle had America’s only general strike, back in 1919, Woody Guthrie was here writing songs in the ‘30s, and there’s still this tradition of people who speak out, who aren’t happy in the mainstream.”

And The Bad Things are happy to continue that tradition. Formed in 2002, they began in the best Seattle way, busking in the city’s historic Pike Place Market and letting their sound, a mix of Balkan fire and desert heat, all generously steeped in weirdness of twisted imagination, slowly take shape. As a six-piece band (instrumentation includes accordion, banjo, guitar, upright bass, trumpet, keys, drums, and mandolin) they performed in the dives and cabarets dotted around town, recording three CDs, culminating in 2008’s It’ll All Be Over Soon.

“We’d intended to make this album long before this,” Berg recalls. “But in 2012, our practice space burned down. It had been our home for a decade, a lot our equipment was there, our P.A., everything. We had to start over. And just when we were recovering, two good friends of ours were killed in a shooting in town, so all our energies went to their memorials. It’s taken us a long time to recover and get back to business.”

“Death of the Inferno,” the album’s title song, is one inhabited by the ghosts of those who’ve gone. The band had originally recorded it years before on their debut 2004 release, but this new version, performed too often lately at memorials and funerals, has taken on an entirely new, deeper resonance, not only filled with the past, but hope for the future.

“It’s now so tied to those difficult times,” Berg agrees. “We brought in a lot of people we know – people who are part of our musical family – to sing on it. We wanted everyone there to add the arms-locked, sing-and-drink-a-long feel that the live version has.”

Sorrow is a part of living, but so is joy, and there’s plenty of that on the album, too, from the bumpy Southwestern ballad of “Young Emily Rose” to the mandolin-driven “Bonnie To My Clyde” or the Balkan romp of “Grifter’s Life.” It’s a celebration of outsiders, punk rock propelled by a tumult of accordions and banjos.

And The Bad Things’ junkyard is a place with ample space for everything, from the tequila desert of “Jalisco Serenade” to the “Green Grass” that covers so much of Washington.

“It’s a document,” Berg says. “The band’s gone through plenty of musical and emotional changes in the last few years. We’ve ventured into new musical styles, and all our lives have changed – we’ve lost loved ones, some of us have had to quit drinking, I’ve become a parent. So After the Inferno is aptly titled. It’s a rebirth for us. We’re going into a future that’s not easily pigeonholed, and we prefer it that way.”

Part of this journey has seen them join an alliance with Danbert Nobacon, a former member of the British anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba, who now makes his home in a small town in Washington.

“I loved that band,” Berg remembers. “I first came across them when I lived in Germany, and they became a big influence on me, the way they articulated things. So I was astonished when I saw Danbert’s name on the listing for a festival here. I emailed him, we began to collaborate and eventually, he became the MC for an event I curate called Punk as Folk. It turned into a friendship and The Bad Things (not to be confused with California synth-rock band Bad Things, with whom they share a co-exist agreement) backed him on his album Woebegone in 2010. He comes to Seattle to do shows regularly, and we occasionally go up to play in Twisp, where he lives.”

Out in Washington State, lurking in the underground, The Bad Things have found their place in the world. Out of the junkyards, After the Inferno, they’ve been reborn.

Here’s a riddle for you: Picture Yma Sumac, Mozart, some Western hippies looking for Indian enlightenment, a couple of blazing hot Bollywood stars, a surf rock guitarist with accompanying surf goddess, a jazz saxophone player, a soaring coloratura soprano, and a very troublesome coyote.

Got that?

Now, all of them walk into a bar and order the same cocktail. What do they order?

A Bombay Rickey, of course.

Welcome to the land of respectful re-imagining, of shaking up, muddling, then clarifying. Good cocktails, after all, are a sum of ingredients that you perhaps wouldn’t think about throwing together, and in the right hands mixing oddly disparate musical flavors can yield a pretty darn colorful sound.

Kamala Sankaram, Drew Fleming, and Jeff Hudgins have the right hands and the right vocal cords for the job. The trio is the nucleus of the five-piece Brooklyn-based ensemble known as Bombay Rickey, along with percussionist Brian Adler and upright bassist Gil Smuskowitz. Their upcoming release Cinefonia runs wild, far beyond category but without losing sight of the sources of the many musics they love.

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It all started on the Q Train, one night after rehearsal. Sankaram, the coloratura soprano in the band of characters above, has never liked being musically stereotyped. Trained in Western Classical music and a student of Hindustani music as well, she’s worked with Anthony Braxton, the Phillip Glass Ensemble, and Anti-Social Music, as well as writing and performing her own operas and pieces. She’s also an enthusiastic cartoon voice-over actress.

“As a performer, I always liked singing different styles of music, and had the ability to do them justice. I can also make weird noises,” Sankaram explains with a smile. “Earlier in my career, when I was doing more new music, I had a straight tone, clean and precise, no vibrato. I was never hired for pop or opera. Then I got known for opera and wasn’t hired for other things. I needed something where I can use everything.”

She became obsessed with Yma Sumac, the 1950s exotica singer knows for her five-octave range and feats of vocal derring-do. Kamala decided to start an Yma cover band, and approached some of her musical friends, the psychedelic Amazonian cumbia-philes, Chicha Libre. They did a one-off show-stopping cover together, but then the band got caught up in other matters.

Not to be daunted, Sankaram kept dreaming about following in Sumac’s pioneering footsteps. She was riding the train home one night with transplanted Texan sax player Jeff Hudgins, who’s worked with everyone from John Zorn to John Harbison. Sankaram revealed her plans and found an immediate and enthusiastic band member. Shortly afterward, guitarist Drew Fleming, another Texan who came up through the Dallas punk scene, came on board and began to explore, as Sankaram puts it, “what other cultures think other cultures sound like,” be it the Western numbers in Bollywood movies, or the secret proto-rumba hidden in Mozart arias. (“Queen of the Rhumba” re-imagines the relentless Queen of the Night as an elegant Latin dance maven).

It was a language of adaptations and devious mishearing, of reinventions and fantastic collisions, a deeply informed and creatively witty sketch of how rhythms and ideas—from Afro-Latin lilts to raga-inspired modes—have slipped into pop culture over the centuries. It was a language they could all speak, although literally what language Yma was singing was a bit of a mystery. “The secret of ‘Taki Rari’”, now the opening cut of Cinefonia“is that I don’t know what the lyrics are,” Kamala recalls. “I listened to what she was saying and made up some Pidgin Spanish.”

The broad embrace of all kinds of influences—sounds that busted out of the generic boxes so tiresome for the trio—changed the band: “We decided we should make our own music, not just be a cover band,” says Hudgins.

India, or some of the legends-as-perceived-by-Westerners of India at any rate, informs many of the tunes on Cinefonia. One day, Sankaram found herself with a gig looming, in desperate need of material. She began writing a song a week in preparation, and gave herself goals for subject matter. After wondering what a remake of Hawaii 5-0 starring Bollywood giant Amitabh Bachchan would sound like, “Bombay 5-0” materialized.

“Dum Maro Dum”, which means “Take Another Toke,” is Bombay Rickey’s collective take on the hit tune, originally sung by Asha Bhosle, from the 1971 Bollywood movie Hare Rama Hare Krishna. (The film addresses the fascinating subject of 1960s Western hippies going to India to seek enlightenment,) Jeff’s “Pondicherry Surf Goddess” started out as an experiment with the then-new Garageband iPad app, and ended up as a tour-de-force, raga-bending theme for a 60s Bollywood surf movie that doesn’t exist.

Yet the Western hemisphere carries equal weight in Bombay Rickey’s language. Peruvian-style cumbias (Hudgins’s “El Final del Pachanga”) share the spotlight with tributes to the trickster of the Southwest, Coyote, and his Orpheus-like journey into the underworld. (“Coyote in the Land of the Dead,” which highlights Sankaram’s eerie calls and the male band members’ voices.)

There’s kitsch and myth, divine sounds and crazy offshoots, yet it all mixes well, like the cocktail the band is named for. “Each of us has such curiosity. We often feel in between all the other worlds we inhabit,” muses Fleming. “But here we can explore all our influences. It’s a bit of mystery how it all works, but it does.”